“Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.”
— “Futility” by Wilfred Owen
Technique
In “Futility,” Wilfred Owen uses the in media res technique to place us in the middle of the action. “In media res” is a Latin phrase that translates to “in the middle of things.”
The above stanza is the first in the poem, and it opens with the first-person narrator (a soldier) directing a comrade to move an expiring soldier into the sun in hopes of it reviving the soldier. The first line doesn’t contextualize the scene, which unfolds as we read on. The third and fourth lines remember the expiring soldier’s life in the fields of France. The next lines contrast the fields with a snowy morning, which seems unlikely to revive him.
Use
- Open with a narrow lens in your prose or poem that places the reader deep in the action and increasingly widen the lens until the full scene is shown.
The Periplous 